RAM SSDs
versus flash SSDs? - this is legacy article (originally published 2007) when
flash SSDs were seriously displacing RAM SSDs as enterprise apps
accelerators. But this article also includes forward looking links to the
situation today in which RAM sockets are being populated by other types of
memories. .

SSD market
analysts this filtered list is a recommended resource for all those
people who need paid-for custom reports and detailed SSD market help. .

the problem
with Write IOPS in flash SSDs - this classic article helps you understand
why all SSD benchmarks incorrectly suggest you're going to get much higher
performance from some types of flash SSDs than you will see in your
application.. .

Editor:-
December 21, 2015 - Network
Appliance has agreed to acquire SolidFire for $870
million in cash according to an
announcement
today - which also said that "with SolidFire, NetApp will now have
all-flash offerings that address each of the 3 largest AFA
market
segments."

Editor's comments:- I had been expecting at
least one SSD company to be
acquired in
December as this has become something of a tradition in recent years.

Editor:- December 21,
2015 - Memblaze
today
announced
it had received "tens of millions of US dollars" in Series C
funding. Among other things the company said it will now expand its sales
efforts in international markets.Micron's $3 billion gamble on Inotera

Editor's
comments:- Micron officially says this is about securing
RAM manufacturing capacity
- because Inotera supplies about a third of Micron's DRAM.

In an email
reply to a reader question at around this time (about Micron's 3DXPoint) I said
this...

"I have never thought that 3DXPoint (if it was real) would
have any impact on the enterprise market in the next few years  for
reasons I explained at the time. Flash based RAM replacements (from
Diablo,
Netlist,
OCZ,
SanDisk and others)
which use another memory tier  will have the same effect on enterprise
DRAM revenue that SATA SSDs did on the 15K SAS HDD market. But much
sooner  in 1- 2 years. At best 3DXPoint  would have density
characteristics similar to what flash-as-RAM can already deliver now. And
flash is proven  so it doesn't have to wait for a 2 year evaluation and
reliability assessment period before it can be used in servers. If 3DXPoint
was deliverable - its immediate applications would be limited to consumer
products where reliability is not important. There may be real products which
come out of the many alt nvms  but in the short term these announcements
sound more like funding requests to keep the technology teams intact for
yet another
iteration cycle."

So why does Micron want more RAM capacity?

A
semi-serious interpretation might be - it's a poison pill. Who would want to
buy a RAM company? Except Micron which knows RAM.

Another
interpretation is that - by paying a premium price for Inotera - Micron is
saying it is worth more too. We've seen this kind of huff and bluff many
times before in the storage market. It doesn't always follow that the valuations
are sustained.

On the other hand - it may be nothing to do with RAM at
all.

It can be viewed as a convenient way of buying more
semiconductor wafer fab capacity in readiness for a market in which the SSD
ecosystem will be able to consume more memory than all the chip companies
currently make.

It does take a little while to repurpose fabs from
making one type of memory to another - but it's not a big deal. The big deal is
knowing what SSDs the memories will wind up in.NSF funds project to progress in-situ SSD processing

"We've made great strides in developing our
fundamental SSD technology, with a working prototype (of in-situ SSD processing)
now running in our lab," said Nader Salessi,
CEO and founder of NxGn Data.

The grant application says - "This
project explores the Big Data paradigm shift where processing capability is
pushed as close to the data as possible. The in-situ processing technology
pushes this concept to the absolute limit, by putting the computational
capability directly into the storage itself and eliminating the need to move the
data to main memory before processing."Plexistor aims to bind factions in SSD DIMM wars

Editor:- December 15, 2015 - Plexistor (an SSD
software company emerging from stealth in stages)
announced
today that it is on track for beta release of its Software-Defined Memory (SDM)
platform for next-generation data centers in Q1 2016.

Plexistor says
that SDM will support a wide range of memory and storage technologies such as
DRAM and emerging nvm
devices such as
NVDIMM-N
and
3D
XPoint as well as traditional flash storage devices such as NVMe and
NVMe
over Fabric, enabling a scalable infrastructure to deliver persistent high
capacity storage at near-memory speed.

Re the title "SSD 101 etc" - how
far it satisfies "everything" you want to know is debatable. But if
you're starting out in flash and need the reassurance that the technology
background is sound - this series is better than many others I've seen.

Editor:-
December 2, 2015 - Pure
Storagereported
that revenue in the recent quarter was $131.4 million - which was 2.6x
the revenue of the year ago period.

Pure Storage said it grew its
customer base to over 1,350 organizations, adding more than 250 new customers in
the third quarter, including Domino's Pizza and The Boston Globe. Existing
customers ConocoPhillips, LinkedIn and ServiceNow also expanded the scope of
their relationships with Pure Storage.

Editor's comments:-
Pure Storage's revenue in the most recent quarter was approximately 10x
the revenue
reported
today by Violin.

December 2012 -
STEC said the
company's interim CEO, and former CEO and founder had both reduced their
salaries to $1.

December 2011 -
Apple acquired Anobit (a pioneer in
adaptive R/W
and DSP ECC controller IP for flash SSDs). One of the critical recurring
manufacturing costs for all smartphone makers at that time and in ensuing years
was the cost of flash memory. Adaptive technologies enabled consumer and
enterprise companies to deploy new generations of flash with smaller cells
despite their unreliability when using traditional meta-market statistically
based timing and ECC care techniques.

December 2008 -
Texas Memory Systems
and Santa announced an initiative to replace all monolithic RAID
storage at the North Pole with energy efficient and super fast SSDs by the end
of 2009.

December
2001 - Platypus
Technology announced a channel strategy for its SSD aimed at the
database accelerator market. One of the arguments which Platypus used to
advocate its SSD accelerators was that users could significantly reduce their
server count and software licensing costs at the same time as speeding up
application performance.